Trends on social media are notoriously short lived. Memes can live and die before sunset, and 15 minutes of fame is now only 140 characters long. This high-frequency, short-lived pattern of social media is simultaneously one of its most celebrated and most maligned attributes.

For security and risk professionals, the highly dynamic aspect of social media presents a uniquely difficult challenge. To stay one step ahead of the bad actors and ever-shifting landscape — identifying emerging risks before they impact your organization — is a herculean task. Threats can come and go like any other viral trend, proliferating, wreaking havoc and decaying just in time for the next threat to emerge. Bad actors are constantly changing their tactics to counteract a defender’s efforts.

This industry is moving toward “searching out, identifying and understanding adversaries,” or “threat hunting.” Threat hunting uses both threat intelligence and domain knowledge to rapidly discover new adversaries and techniques. ZeroFOX FoxThreats is our approach to this new wave of threat hunting, only tailored to social media where adversaries, scammers and cyber criminals can change their tactics more quickly than ever before.

To help the modern security and risk professional stay ahead of such an elusive and volatile threat vector, we are announcing the new ZeroFOX FoxThreats Program. In this program, we will regularly update ZeroFOX Platform rules based on emerging social media threats identified by the ZeroFOX Research team. FoxThreats takes advantage of the flexibility and extensibility of the FoxScript language to rapidly update global rules sets for all of our customers. ZeroFOX FoxThreats targets new threats to customers, social networks and the public alike, including net new malvertising, bad actors, phishing, scams, fraud, malware, and more.

In addition, ZeroFOX Research will also regularly publish our findings on trending social media threats in this blog and in disclosures to customers, social networks and the public alike. Some examples of the types of risks the first FoxThreats post will include:

Known bad actors that attempt to socially engineer your organization.

Fraudulent advertising links that download malware onto your system and are not detected by traditional antivirus/endpoint measures.

For ZeroFOX customers, FoxThreat rules are updated within the ZeroFOX Platform and are on by default. Documentation on these rules can be found on the ZeroFOX user guide. For more information, reach out to your CSR.